Software for editing photos?

[Samsperdy]

Hi everyone,
I am a young bird photographer with a lot of unedited wildlife photos. I tried using gimp, and found it a bit difficult to get the hang of. I was wondering what you guys use and if you have any suggestions in what I should invest into.
I shoot in RAW and JPEG and am willing to pay for a good software.
Thanks
Sam

[Oskar]

Adobe Lightroom Classic is what I use. It's really really good in my opinion.

[ZionCooper]

I’ve heard DXO Photolabs is pretty good. They make great noise reduction software.

[Threeps]

I've been using both Photoshop Elements and ON1 RAW 2021. Alongside this I use ON1 NoNoise AI 2022 which is incredible at reducing noise in RAW images. This also works as a plugin with PSE.

[Ken George]

Have a look at ACDSee range of products. As a retired professional photographer of 40 years working, the three I would recommend are either ACDSee, or Adobe's Lightroom. Last choice would be the full version of Photoshop (not Elements), it's only last because it's a monster piece of software that may be well beyond what you need, it's really about layering and composite imaging and integration with other imaging tools. ACDSee full version works well with a two screen setup, one with your browser showing your thumbnails and the other screen the image as you edit in full size. I think Lightroom has a twin screen mode as well, trying to do it all on a single screen is hard work.

[Finn Davey]

I used to use a mixture if Lightroom and Photoshop, but have switched to only photoshop as I'm doing more complex editing to some of my images now.

Photoshop is great as I feel it has a wider range of tools to use, but is a bit of a learning curve.
I've been using it for about 4 years and still only just learning how to use specific features.

However Photoshop and Lightroom do have similar colour grading tools.

[Neil Fitzgerald]

I use Capture One these days. Previously used Adobe Lightroom but I refuse to pay monthly subscription so ditched that (and other Adobe products) when I needed to upgrade. Capture One is far better for raw conversion, IMO, and I now seldom have much need for Photoshop. It's not as good for sorting and metadata though.
Dark table is a good free alternative to Lightroom, and Gimp is a good alternative to PS if you want to composite or things like that.

[Raewyn]

I've just had my Photoshop renewal come around. It's AUD$176 per year and includes Lightroom, some cloud storage and other apps. I only use Photoshop including Adobe Bridge/Camera Raw and have stayed with it for the consistency of the indexing and other metadata features, although I admit that it's a long time since I looked further afield at other products.

[Ken George]

Hi Raewyn, that actually sounds like pretty good value for money to me. $176AUD is about a couple of hundred bucks NZ per year for really a lot of great Adobe photo managing and editing software. If you do a lot of photography and image filing and editing per year the Adobe suite sounds worth the cost. Depends on whether you're high or low usage I guess.

[Neil Fitzgerald]

As far as cost goes, I think it is more important to consider how often you typically upgrade software, to get new features or to support new camera. My last camera, and PS/LR versions to work with it lasted me 10 years and that was fine for 100k images or so. Cameras and software are pretty mature these days. If I was to rent software for that period it would have cost much more (I think I worked out the break even was about 5 years).